Israel Matzav

Israel denies NY Times report that Obama stopped strike on Iran

Prime Minister Netanyahu's spokesman, Mark Regev, has denied a report in the New York Times that the Obama administration stopped Israel from attacking Iran during the run-up to the US election last year. This is from the second link.

Fearing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the verge of ordering an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear plants, President Obama sent two emissaries here almost exactly a year ago to stop him. Warning that the White House could not abide an attack in the run-up to the November elections, the Americans persuaded the prime minister to give the newest sanctions time to bite, according to Americans and Israelis familiar with the tense exchanges. 

During Mr. Obama’s own visit here in March, he made clear, again, that if Iran truly got close to building a bomb, the United States would act, squashing talk of an Israeli strike since. 

Israel is denying that the US stopped it from attacking Iran. 

The Times quoted Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev as saying that the report was "completely untrue."

Regev said that “no such emissaries were sent with that message. The American position to us is clear and has always been clear, that Israel has the right to defend itself by itself against threats.”

The prime minister's spokesman declined to comment on how close Netanyahu came to launching  strikes against Iran.

“I’m not commenting on what the prime minister was doing or not doing, thinking or not thinking,” Regev said. “I can’t tell you what the Americans were thinking. I can tell you what messages were delivered, and it’s not true.”

The Times reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu may regret not ordering the strike when he could have done so.

Israeli and other analysts say that Mr. Netanyahu’s hands are now all but tied. Israel could hardly exercise its military option while the United States is negotiating, experts say, and would be hard-pressed to strike if Washington and its other allies reach a deal with Iran.

“He’s cornered — is he going to spoil the international celebration and say, ‘I think it’s not a good enough deal so I’m going to use the military option?' ” asked Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “If there is a good deal, it’s a good deal for him as well. If there is no deal, he can go it alone, but if there is a bad deal, what can he do? He’s trapped. That’s his nightmare.”

And it gets worse. Israel and the US do not see eye to eye on Iran.

While Washington and Jerusalem have the same stated goal of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, there is a growing chasm over what might be the acceptable terms for an agreement. Mr. Netanyahu’s new mantra is “distrust, dismantle and verify,” and in an interview with NBC News he insisted on “a full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program,” something Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has made clear is unacceptable.

Israel, like the Sunni Arab gulf states, also fears that resolving the nuclear issue would remove the primary instrument for containing Iran as a regional power. Lifting sanctions would not only signal new international legitimacy for Tehran, but it would also allow Iran to rebuild its hobbled economy, giving it the means to intervene all across the region, financing radical groups and promoting its ideology.

The United States, on the other hand, sees broad benefits to a rapprochement. And while its official position is also that Iran must forgo major elements of its existing programs — including its 18,000 centrifuges, which enrich uranium, and a heavy-water reactor that could create another pathway to a bomb — Mr. Obama has not recently used the word “dismantle” in his own public comments. Instead he has simply said that Iran must prove its program is peaceful in nature, as Mr. Rouhani insists it is.

That decision not to declare publicly that Iran must destroy much of what it has built “really riled the Israelis on their trip,” according to one former senior American official who met with some of them.

An American involved in devising the West’s negotiating strategy said, “The Israelis want to go back to where the Iranians were a decade ago.” The American continued: “No one in the U.S. disagrees with that as a goal. The question is whether it’s achievable, and whether it’s better to have a small Iranian capacity that is closely watched, or to insist on eliminating their capacity altogether.”

Worse still, President Hussein Obama is saying that Iran is still a year or more away from the bomb, when Israeli assessments talk in terms of weeks. 

"Our assessment continues to be a year or more away, and in fact, actually our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services," Obama said in reply to a question about the US intelligence assessment on Iran's timetable for nuclear weapons.

And the 'moderate' Rohani is not making the decisions for Iran. 

Obama said he understands why Israel is skeptical, but said he wants to test whether Rouhani can "follow through."

"The way the Iranian system works, he's not the only decision maker. He's not even the ultimate decision maker," Obama said.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday he supported Rouhani's diplomatic opening at the UN General Assembly last week.

But Khamenei, who would make final decisions on any nuclear deal, said that some of what occurred at the UN was "not proper" - a hint at some disagreement over Rouhani's phone conversation with Obama.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:34 PM